Studies in Rhetoric/Communication

Scientific arguments—and indeed arguments in most disciplines—depend on visuals and other nontextual elements; however, most models of argumentation typically neglect these important resources. In Assembling Arguments, Jonathan Buehl offers a concentrated study of scientific argumentation that is sensitive to both the historical and theoretical possibilities of multimodal persuasion as it advances two related claims. First, rhetorical theory—when augmented with methods for reading nonverbal representations—can provide the analytical tools needed to understand and appreciate multimodal scientific arguments. Second, science—an inherently multimodal enterprise—offers ideal subjects for developing general theories of multimodal rhetoric applicable across fields.
In developing these claims, Buehl offers a comprehensive account of scientific persuasion as a multimodal process and develops a simple but productive framework for analyzing and teaching multimodal argumentation. Comprising five case studies, the book provides detailed treatments of argumentation in specific technological and historical contexts: argumentation before World War I, when images circulated by hand and by post; argumentation during the mid-twentieth century, when computers were beginning to bolster scientific inquiry but images remained hand-crafted products; and argumentation at the turn of the twenty-first century—an era of digital revolutions and digital fraud.
Each study examines the rhetorical problems and strategies of specific scientists to investigate key issues regarding visualization and argument: 1) establishing new instruments as reliable sources of visual evidence; 2) creating novel arguments from reliable visual evidence; 3) creating novel arguments with unreliable visual evidence; 4) preserving the credibility of visualization practices; and 5) creating multimodal artifacts before and in the era of digital circulation.
Given the growing enterprise of rhetorical studies and the field’s contributions to communication practices in all disciplines, rhetoricians need a comprehensive rhetoric of science—one that accounts for the multimodal arguments that change our relation to reality. Assembling Arguments argues that such rhetoric should enable the interpretation of visual scientific arguments and improve science-writing instruction.

In this groundbreaking examination of the symbolic strategies used to prepare troops for imminent combat, Keith Yellin offers an interdisciplinary look into the rhetorical discourse that has played a prominent role in warfare, history, and popular culture from antiquity to the present day. Battle Exhortation focuses on one of the most time-honored forms of motivational communication, the encouraging speech of military commanders, to offer a pragmatic and scholarly evaluation of how persuasion contributes to combat leadership and military morale.
In illustrating his subject's conventions, Yellin draws from the Bible, classical Greece and Rome, Spanish conquistadors, and American military forces. Yellin is also interested in how audiences are socialized to recognize and anticipate this type of communication that precedes difficult team efforts. To account for this dimension he probes examples as diverse as Shakespeare's Henry V, George C. Scott's portrayal of General George S. Patton, and team sports.

Breast or Bottle? is the first scholarly examination of the shift in breastfeeding recommendations occurring over the last half century. Through a close analysis of scientific and medical controversies and a critical examination of the ways in which medical beliefs are communicated to the public, Amy Koerber exposes layers of shifting arguments and meaning that inform contemporary infant-feeding advocacy and policy.
Whereas the phrase "breast or bottle" might once have implied a choice between two relative equals, human milk is now believed to possess unique health-promoting qualities. Although it is tempting to view this revision in medical thinking as solely the result of scientific progress, Koerber argues that a progress-based interpretation is incomplete. Epidemiologic evidence demonstrating the health benefits of human milk has grown in recent years, but the story of why these forms of evidence have dramatically increased in recent decades, Koerber reveals, is a tale of the dedicated individuals, coalitions, and organizations engaged in relentless rhetorical efforts to improve our scientific explanations and cultural appreciation of human milk, lactation, and breastfeeding in the context of a historical tendency to devalue these distinctly female aspects of the human body. Koerber demonstrates that the rhetoric used to promote breastfeeding at a given time and cultural moment not only reflects a preexisting reality but also shapes the infant-feeding experience for new mothers.
Koerber's claims are grounded in extensive rhetorical research including textual analysis, archival research, and interviews with key stakeholders in the breastfeeding controversy. Her approach offers a vital counterpoint to other feminist analyses of the shift toward probreastfeeding scientific discourse and presents a revealing rhetorical case study in the complex relationship between scientific data and its impact on medical policy and practices. The resulting interdisciplinary study will be of keen interest to scholars and students of rhetoric, communication, women's studies, medical humanities, and public health as well as medical practitioners and policymakers.

The charismatic movement that began in the first century currently spans the globe. The term "charismatic" refers to the "gifts of the Holy Spirit"—speaking in tongues, healing, prophecy, and discernment—said to be available to Christians who have surrendered their lives to Christ. Charismatic Christianity as a Global Culture takes readers on a journey to discover the history of the movement and the reasons why more and more Christians are finding the charismatic experience so meaningful.
Leading scholars in the fields of religion and anthropology discuss the thought patterns and religious traditions of charismatics throughout the world. By examining believers throughout the Americas, Africa, Asia, and Europe, the contributors provide a comprehensive overview of a charismatic tapestry that appears to transcend national, ethnic, racial, and class boundaries.
In her introduction, Karla Poewe describes how believers attempt to integrate mind, body, and spirit, thereby providing for a more holistic religious experience. Poewe points out that charismatic Christianity and Pentecostalism have suffered from academic biases in the past; this book is one of the first to place the charismatic experience in an academic framework.

In A City of Marble, Kathleen Lamp argues that classical rhetorical theory shaped the Augustan cultural campaigns and that in turn the Augustan cultural campaigns functioned rhetorically to help Augustus gain and maintain power and to influence civic identity and participation in the Roman Principate (27 b. c. e.—14 c. e.).
Lamp begins by studying rhetorical treatises, those texts most familiar to scholars of rhetoric, and moves on to those most obviously using rhetorical techniques in visual form. She then arrives at those objects least recognizable as rhetorical artifacts, but perhaps most significant to the daily lives of the Roman people—coins, altars, wall painting. This progression also captures the development of the Augustan political myth that Augustus was destined to rule and lead Rome to greatness as a descendant of the hero Aeneas.
A City of Marble examines the establishment of this myth in state rhetoric, traces its circulation, and finally samples its popular receptions and adaptations. In doing so, Lamp inserts a long-excluded though significant audience—the common people of Rome—into contemporary understandings of rhetorical history and considers Augustan culture as significant in shaping civic identity, encouraging civic participation, and promoting social advancement.
Lamp approaches the relationship between classical rhetoric and Augustan culture through a transdisciplinary methodology drawn from archaeology, art and architectural history, numismatics, classics, and rhetorical studies. By doing so, she grounds Dionysius of Halicarnassus’s claims that the Principate represented a renaissance of rhetoric rooted in culture and a return to an Isocratean philosophical model of rhetoric, thus offering a counterstatement to the “decline narrative” that rhetorical practice withered in the early Roman Empire. Thus Lamp’s work provides a step toward filling the disciplinary gap between Cicero and the Second Sophistic.

Emerging in China in the early 1990s, Falun Gong is viewed by its supporters as a folk movement promoting the benefits of good health and moral cultivation. To the Chinese establishment, however, it is a dissident religious cult threatening political orthodoxy and national stability. The author, a Chinese national once involved in implementing Chinese cultural policies, examines the evolving relationship between Falun Gong and Chinese authorities in a revealing case study of the powerful public discourse between a pervasive political ideology and an alternative agenda in contention for cultural dominance.
Posited as a cure for culturally bound illness with widespread symptoms, the Falun Gong movement's efficacy among the marginalized relies on its articulation of a struggle against government sanctioned exploitation in favor of idealistic moral aspirations. In countering such a position, the Chinese government alleges that the religious movement is based in superstition and pseudoscience. Aided by her insider perspective, the author deftly employs Western rhetorical methodology in a compelling critique of an Eastern rhetorical occurrence, highlighting how authority confronts challenge in postsocialist China.

In Democracy and Rhetoric, Nathan Crick articulates from John Dewey's body of work a philosophy of rhetoric that reveals the necessity for bringing forth a democratic life infused with the spirit of ethics, a method of inquiry, and a sense of beauty. Crick relies on rhetorical theory as well interdisciplinary insights from philosophy, history, sociology, aesthetics, and political science as he demonstrates that significant engagement with issues of rhetoric and communication are central to Dewey's political philosophy.
In his rhetorical reading of Dewey, Crick examines the sophistical underpinnings of Dewey's philosophy and finds it much informed by notions of radical individuality, aesthetic experience, creative intelligence, and persuasive advocacy as essential to the formation of communities of judgment. Crick illustrates that for Dewey rhetoric is an art situated within a complex and challenging social and natural environment, wielding influence and authority for those well versed in its methods and capable of experimenting with its practice. From this standpoint the unique and necessary function of rhetoric in a democracy is to advance minority views in such a way that they might have the opportunity to transform overarching public opinion through persuasion in an egalitarian public arena. The truest power of rhetoric in a democracy then is the liberty
for one to influence the many through free, full, and fluid communication.
Ultimately Crick argues that Dewey's sophistical rhetorical values and techniques form a naturalistic "ontology of becoming" in which discourse is valued for its capacity to guide a self, a public, and a world in flux toward some improved incarnation. Appreciation of this ontology of becoming—of democracy as a communication-driven work in progress—gives greater social breadth and historical scope to Dewey's philosophy while solidifying his lasting contributions to rhetoric in an active and democratic public sphere.

Robert E. Terrill argues that, in order to invent a robust manner of addressing one another as citizens, Americans must learn to draw on the delicate indignities of racial exclusion that have stained citizenship since its inception. In Double-Consciousness and the Rhetoric of Barack Obama, Terrill demonstrates how President Barack Obama’s public address models such a discourse.
Terrill contends that Obama’s most effective oratory invites his audiences to experience a form of “double-consciousness,” which was famously described by W. E. B. Du Bois as a feeling of “two-ness” resulting from the African American experience of “always looking at one’s self through the eyes of others.” It is described as an effect of cruel alienation that can also bring a gift of “second-sight” in the form of perspectives on practices of citizenship not available to those in positions of privilege. When addressing fellow citizens, Obama is asking each to share in the “peculiar sensation” that Du Bois described. The racial history of U.S. citizenship is a resource for inventing contemporary ways of speaking about race.
Joining with other work that suggests that double-consciousness may be a vital democratic attitude, Terrill extends those insights to consider it as a mode of address. Through close analyses of selected speeches from Obama’s 2008 campaign and first presidential term, this book argues that Obama does not present double-consciousness merely as a point of view but rather as an idiom with which we might speak to one another. Of course, as Du Bois’s work reminds us, double-consciousness results from imposition and encumbrance, so that Obama’s oratory presents a mode of address that emphasizes the burdens of citizenship together with the benefits, the price as well as the promise.

Genuine Teachers of This Art examines the technê, or "handbook," tradition—which it controversially suggests began with Isocrates—as the central tradition in ancient rhetoric and a potential model for contemporary rhetoric. From this innovative perspective, Jeffrey Walker offers reconsiderations of rhetorical theories and schoolroom practices from early to late antiquity as the true aim of the philosophical rhetoric of Isocrates and as the distinctive expression of what Cicero called "the genuine teachers of this art."
Through a study of the classical rhetorical paideia, or training system, Walker makes a case for considering rhetoric not as an Aristotelian critical-theoretical discipline, but as an Isocratean pedagogical discipline in which the art of rhetoric is neither an art of producing critical theory nor even an art of producing speeches and texts, but an art of producing speakers and writers. Walker grounds his study in pedagogical theses mined from revealing against-the-grain readings of Cicero, Isocrates, and Dionysius of Halicarnassus. Walker also locates supporting examples from a host of other sources, including Aelius Theon, Aphthonius, the Rhetoric to Alexander, the Rhetoric to Herennius, Quintilian, Hermogenes, Hermagoras, Lucian, Libanius, Apsines, the Anonymous Seguerianus, and fragments of ancient student writing preserved in papyri. Walker's epilogue considers the relevance of the ancient technê tradition for the modern discipline of rhetoric, arguing that rhetoric is defined foremost by its pedagogical enterprise, the project of producing rhetors capable of intelligent, effective, and useful civic engagement through speech and writing.
This groundbreaking vision of the technê tradition significantly revises the standard picture of the ancient history of rhetoric with ramifications for the contemporary disciplinary identity of rhetoric itself.

History tells us that on a day when the forces of civil government confront the forces of military might, no one knows what may follow. Americans believe that they have avoided this moment, that whatever other challengesthe country has faced, at least it never has had to deal with the prospects of a coup d’état. Stephen Howard Browne maintains that this view is mistaken, that in fact the United States faced such a crisis, at the very moment when thecountry announced its arrival on the world scene in the spring of 1783 in a rustic meeting hall along the Hudson River near Newburgh, New York. The crisis was resolved by George Washington, commander in chief of the U.S. Army, in an address he delivered to a roomful of restive and deeply disaffected officers.
In The Ides of War, Browne examines the resolution of the first confrontation between the forces of American civil government and the American military—the Newburgh Crisis. He tells the story of what transpired on that day, examines what was said, and suggests what we might learn from the affair. Browne shows that George Washington’s Newburgh Address is a stunning example of the power of human agency to broker one of our most persistent, most troublesome dilemmas: the rival claims to power of civil and military authorities. At stake in this story are biding questions about the meaning and legacy of revolution, the nature of republican government, and ultimately what kind of people we are and profess to be.
Browne holds that although these are monolithic and vexed themes, they are vital and need to be confronted to obtain a coherent and convincing account of history. The Newburgh Crisis offers an unmatched opportunity to examine these themes, as well as the role of rhetoric in the founding of the world’s first modern republic.

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